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Wednesday, December 16, 2009

1st Blogiversary - 3-Layer Graphene Cake

Random Cuisine is celebrating its first-year blog anniversary. I never thought it would be possible to share over 120 recipes, receive at least 50 viewers per day and manage to subscribe 200 viewers throughtout the year while attending graduate school. I manage at this point to organize and lead over 35 cooking sessions. 50 friends and colleagues has joined this project separated into 4 cooking groups. Finally, this project manages to teach 10 people how to become confident cooks. I'm glad to say that this project has been a great success. I would like to thank to all people who came at least one of the cooking sessions and support in writing this blog. A special thank to my uncle who has showed me how baking is as simple as 1-2-3 and my aunt on how to make the cooking sessions more entertaining. I hope I have inspired you viewers to start a similar project like this. You only need to start with a small group, find the people who are willing to lend their place and invite more and more people to join the cooking sessions. One last thing, I was surprised that the Montreal Food Blogger community has found out about my blog and I'm happy to be part of this warm and welcoming group, so a BIG thanks to you all.

Throughout the year, some dishes tasted good, some tasted not so good (which are not posted here), some tasted great, some tasted really good, and some are simply outstanding. Here are the top 15 picks chosen by friends, colleagues and viewers in no order of preference :

Now, let's move on to the next question, why are there 3 cakes on the primary image? The two cakes at the bottom are for my birthday (Fruit Cake, bottom left) which coincides on the same day as my blogiversary and for my Mexican friend, Mon (Mango Mousse Cake, bottom right) which we decided to celebrate hers 2 weeks in advance. I was organizing a surprise cake for her, she thought that the cake I was making was meant for her. I decided to accumulate enough money from friends and colleagues to buy the surprise cake. I was so surprised that we have enough money to buy 2 cakes, showing how much we care and love her. Despite the number of close information leaks and accidental hints, we managed to surprise her. Happy Birthday, Mon! Kudos to all friends and colleagues who went along with the plan and to all who contributed the cakes.

The cake on the top of the image is for the first-year anniversary of my baby blog. Since I started food blogging, I had one thing in mind that I wish to fulfill : to bake from scratch with no shortcuts a multilayer cake with homemade frosting. I revealed my plans for a coconut cake among a few colleagues, some decided that it should have multiple flavours for each layer and my friend, Mathieu was joking about making a graphene cake. So basically I took this as a challenge. For the non-scientistific readers, graphene is not a food ingredient, it is what I am currently working on for the past few years in my research. In short, it is basically a sheet of carbon which has a honeycomb crystal structure. These sheets can be stacked to make graphite which is found in your pencil. Here is how a graphene stacking looks like, this will form the basis of the cake.

I have thought of making this cake unique, I wanted to detach each honeycomb "tower" from the cake without any cutting and serve it as one. If you can't see how, it will be shown pictorially. Enough chit chat, I'm dying to show you how we succesfully made this cake. It took us about 4-5 hours to make it and we were constantly beating egg whites and running the kitchen. The heat of the kitchen was hot hot hot, despite the cold weather in Montreal. The cake consists of three flavoured layers (vanilla, chocolate and lemon respectively) and coconut frosting in between the layers and on the top.

As in the scientific world, I have to write down all the names who contributed to the graphene cake : Victor Y., David J. O., Yony B., Monserratt L., Michel S.,Carlos G., Chris W., Jorge D., Fernando S., Lizbel L., Mathieu C.

Here is a close-up of the graphene cake.

What do you think, isn't that a masterpiece? Here is the recipe of all the components of the cake.

This is the longest post I have ever written, I hope you have enjoyed reading my blog. I will continue writing about food until the next blogiversary. Let me know in the comments section, what dishes did you like the most and what did you like about my blog?